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Today's date

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This is the Daily Tech News for April 26th, 2019.

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From studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane

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Fresh from the Endgame, I'm Len Peralta

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Allison Sheridan of the Podfeet Podcasts

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And I'm the show's Producer Roger Chang

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Tom is out in Vegas today so...

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Let's start with a few tech things you should know...

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Quick Hits

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Uber disclosed that it plans to raise up to $9 billion in its IPO, at a market cap of up to $84 billion, which would put Uber at one of the largest IPOs of all time. Uber reports "projected" Q1 2019 revenue of between $3 billion and $3.1 billion, versus $2.58 billion in revenue for Q1 2018.

Amazon revealed in its latest quarterly earnings that it’s in the process of making free 1-day shipping the default shipping option for Amazon Prime customers. Company CFO Brian Olsavsky stated the company has been working on improving its logistics over the past quarter saying “We’re already starting down this path. We’ve expanded the number of zip codes eligible for one-day shipping.” but added “it will take us a significant amount of time to achieve.” The company says it will reveal more details in the 2nd quarter of the year.

Slack released its S-1 filing in advance of going public, reporting revenue of $400 million and a net loss of $139.8 million for its fiscal year ending in January. The company reported over 10 million daily active users, with more than half located outside the US. Slack reported 88,000 paying customers, up 49% on the year, with customers paying over $100,000 annually for the service, that's up 93%. Slack reports that in the year, paid users spent more than 90 minutes a day engaged on the platform, and that over 1 billion messages per week are sent by users. Under risk factors, Slack listed the need to create systems to stay in compliance with data regulations like GDPR.

The New York Times reports that the New York State attorney general’s office plans to open an investigation into Facebook's unauthorized collection of 1.5 million email contact lists since May 2016. Facebook has stated the collection was unintentional and that the contacts were used to improve Facebook's ad targeting, build social connections, and recommend friends. Since reported by Business Insider last week, Facebook turned off the functionality and stated it was in the process of deleting the data. The company said it is responding to questions from the attorney general's office.

Meanwhile, Facebook notified Ireland's Data Protection Commission that it discovered hundreds of millions of user passwords associated with Facebook, Facebook Lite and Instagram, were stored by the company in plain text format in its internal servers. The DPC began a inquiry in relation to this issue to determine whether Facebook has complied with its obligations under relevant provisions of the GDPR. The Canadian government is looking into this issue as well.

iFixit responded to Samsung's request to pull its Galaxy Fold teardown, but apparently not directly from Samsung itself. iFixit said in a stateent: "We were provided our Galaxy Fold unit by a trusted partner. Samsung has requested, through that partner, that iFixit remove its teardown. We are under no obligation to remove our analysis, legal or otherwise. But out of respect for this partner, whom we consider an ally in making devices more repairable, we are choosing to withdraw our story until we can purchase a Galaxy Fold at retail."

Lime scooters in Brisbane have been making suggestive and offensive comments to riders after pranksters swapped audio files on some vehicles. The scooters were hacked to make a variety of comments most of which were sexual in nature, local papers in the city reported. Lime said the prank was "not funny" and that it was working to return the hacked scooters to their normal state.

Propublica alleges TurboTax uses deceptive design and misleading advertising to trick lower-income Americans into paying to file their taxes, even though they are eligible to do it for free. Intuit, which owns TurboTax, appears to be hiding this free option from Google Search, by adding code on its site telling search engines not to list TurboTax Free File in search results. Sen. Ron Wyden, said in a statement that Intuit's practices are outrageous and that he plans to investigate further.

Waterford Upstart, a project started in Utah and spread across 15 US states, offers an online curriculum for children from low-income families and rural communities. It was awarded a Audacious Project grant that is being criticized by CCFC or “Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood” who believe that online education in lieu of classroom and teachers will widen inequality.

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an educational professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote as part of CCFC’s letter to TED, the organizers of the Audacious Project initiative: "Kids learn by playing, exploring and interacting with adults - not by memorising letters, numbers and colours presented to them on screens." The Audacious Project offers a $280 million prize shared across 8 projects to tackle the world’s toughest challenges.

Hearing about the test store yesterday reminded me that about 5 months ago there seemed to be a big push from the Walmart tech labs advertising in software engineering podcast, LinkedIn, and websites as a recruitment and to change their perspective in the developer community as somewhere to work in "cool" technology. In any case just adding a little more info and it looks like they may have gotten some good talent. - Martin

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